


So Help Me, God

by stet



Category: Hetalia: Axis Powers
Genre: Other, Politics
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-03-02
Updated: 2019-03-02
Packaged: 2019-11-07 22:52:45
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 719
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17969585
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/stet/pseuds/stet
Summary: Post-2016 America scribble.





	So Help Me, God

He stands there for what feels like an hour, right hand raised, 14 pairs of wisened American eyes staring right through him. They’d given him the dignity of a closed-door afternoon evisceration in the bowels of Dirksen, where no one would think to go looking for someone important; there are no camera shutters clicking, no frantic footsteps in leather-soled shoes, no smartphone pings or recorder beeps. There is just the sound of his own  _I do_ , and the excruciating scrape of wood on carpet as he pulls out his chair.

He is nervous, which was new. He is a creature of the Hill, much as he likes to pretend otherwise, and so the procedure itself is comfortingly familiar, but he is not used to feeling culpable. The questions grow harder – more pointed, yes, but also genuinely more difficult to answer. The awful truth of his own incompetence is slow to dawn on the senators, whom he looks to with increasing desperation, hoping to see in their stern statesmen’s expressions some glimmer of the chummy pistol-behind-the-back faux-camaraderie his countrymen were supposed to have for each other. But in those 14 pairs of eyes he sees nothing but a slow, steadily-growing horror. He feels it too.

 _I don’t know,_  he keeps saying, in answer to their whys, their hows. Where was he that night, when everything changed? Who did he talk to, and what did they say? What went so wrong, so terribly wrong?  _I don’t have an answer to that. I don’t know. I don’t know._

* * *

 

The music fades out and he stands before the crowd, half-hidden by the great man’s great shadow. He has always loved the feeling of a thousand eyes on him. He is not just listened to, he feels – he is heard. The sea of red pinpoints sways and swells, then stills completely with the man’s first nasally inhale. Then, before he can so much as get out a greeting, they roar their approval. He is deafened by the noise, exhilarated. He is reminded of that big triple-spiral roller coaster he rode at a theme park somewhere in Tennessee – reminded of that sweet, sick feeling he got when the front of the ride vehicle dipped over the drop-off, that final half-second before the dizzying plunge.

He supposes he is addicted now. Yet this, unlike the others, is an addiction he can feed. He has always been at the mercy of popular sovereignty, as some men are slaves to sex or liquor. His wealthy landed Fathers would disapprove – indeed, had disapproved 200-something years ago, in their screeds about the evils of so-called mob rule – but he has never considered it to be a vice or a weakness. He is the People, whoever and wherever they happen to be at the moment. He does, feels, thinks as they wish. And when he stands in an auditorium full to the rafters and feels their shouts and hollers like tremors in his lungs, they give him purpose. They give him their strength.

Almost two years have passed since the day they say he hit rock bottom. He remembers he woke up in a hospital at 3 o’clock in the morning, Narcan in his nose and tubes in his arms, but the rest is a blur too long and too black to think twice about. He sat up, threw open the curtains and gaped out his third-floor window, just as the marchers were passing by.  _Not Our President_. At least he hadn’t had to wonder long.

Now he’s sober, and the other Nations treat him differently. They answer emails callously. They have unfollowed him on social media. When they pass him in the hall, there’s a coldness in their faces he never noticed before – though maybe it has always been there, and he’d been too self-absorbed to see it. When he meets their eyes, they flinch. He has ruled the world for half a century, and what is fear if not an acknowledgment of power? But it’s naked fear now, mortal fear. They don’t indulge his savior complex, begging for his protection. They don’t even claim to like him. And no one does, he knows, save for those ten thousand people beneath ten thousand red hats in an auditorium.

He decides, to his own horror, that he likes it that way.


End file.
